Tunnel in the Sky is a science fiction book written by Robert Heinlein and published in 1955. It circles around a training mission gone very wrong which strands a group of students on an uninhabited planet for several years, and depicts their hardships, culminating with their eventual return.

Plot Summary

A Malthusian catastrophe has been averted only by the invention of the Ramsbotham Jump, used to teleport Earth's excess population to other solar systems. However, the capital and energy costs of operating the devices mean that extrasolar colonies are isolated until they can build up a sufficient trade surplus to pay for two-way communication.

The book's theme is that social and moral structures are a response to economic and technological conditions; this is highlighted in the person of Rod Walker, an urbanite teenager with dreams of becoming a professional colonist. When his "solo survival" test goes wrong and he and a group of students are stranded on an unoccupied planet, it is only through luck that he survives his naïvete and becomes the seed for the establishment of a community. Heinlein tracks the political, social and technological development of this village of educated Westerners deprived of the rudiments of technological civilisation, culminating in its immediate dissolution when contact with Earth is reestablished.

Heinlein uses the discontinuity imposed by the Ramsbotham Jump to comment on the relativistic nature of morality and politics. Within minutes of arriving on the test planet, the murder of a fellow student for his gun demonstrates the irrepressible danger of human nature; likewise, the numerous political crises of the fledgling colony illustrate the need for legitimacy in a government appropriate for the society it administers. Even ecomonics is revealed as adaptive to the situation; the extreme codependence of the colonists forces a comminutarian lifestyle with possessions being restricted to what can be carried on one's person.

When the Earth technicians break through after several years of isolation, the culture shock experienced by the colonists evokes Heinlein's disquiet at modern civilisation. Rod Walker, developed by necessity from an idealistic dreamer into the hard-headed leader of a sovereign state, is suddenly reverted to the status of a half-educated boy. It soon becomes apparent that emigration from Earth, far from a dream, is now the only way he can retain his identity.

Further topics of the book are the value of human learning and ingenuity, the deceptive danger of weaponry, the necessity of ritual and entertainment to a cohesive society, the status of politics as an invention to permit cooperation in spite of human nature, and a derision of gender and racial roles beyond those necessitated by human biology. The book's rejection of unearned authority meshes with the libertarian character of Heinlein's early works, but its romanticisation of the pioneer ideal as the best means for human beings to reach self-expression presages that of Time Enough For Love.

Editions

• July 12, 1981, Del Rey, paperback, ISBN 0345301056
• October 12, 1985, Del Rey, paperback, ISBN 0345332121
• October 12, 1987, Del Rey, paperback, 224 pages, ISBN 0345353730
• March 30, 1988, Atheneum, hardcover, ISBN 068418916X
• October 1991, MacMillan Publishing Company, library binding, ISBN 9991253122
• May 31, 1995, Ballantine Books, paperback, ISBN 9990830215
• November 4, 2003, Del Rey, paperback, 272 pages, ISBN 0345466233
• March 15, 2005, Pocket, paperback, 272 pages, ISBN 1416505512

Links

• Neal Asher
• Gridlinked
• runcible